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Thursday, September 8, 2016

Blake Crouch's trippy thriller, Dark Matter, has the feel of a late-night, stoned-to-the-gills dorm room conversation. But it's also a read that zooms at along at breathless, breakneck pace, partially owning to the fact that it has the feel of a thinly veiled movie script (short, sparse sentences, lots of chase scenes, exposition in dialogue, cliffhanger chapters, etc.). This can be annoying or exciting, depending on your personal reading preferences. In this case, I enjoyed it — the movie script aspect of the writing doesn't detract from the story itself, which is an inventive take on the fiction about science genre (which is different, barely, than science fiction, I think).

But before we get into "Dude, but what if there are infinite universes and therefore infinite burritos?"-type questions, and more thoughtful discussions about superposition (you know, Schröinger's cat) and theories of what dark matter might be, we meet our protagonist: A normal guy named Jason Dressen, who is an average upper middle-class Chicagoan. Jason is a physics professor at small-time Chicago college, happily married to a beautiful woman named Daniela, and the proud parent of a teenager named Charlie. Jason had given up his promising career as a research physicist in his late 20s to marry and have a child — a decision for which he's often questioned by his colleagues, but about which he has no regrets.

One night, Jason goes to have a drink with one of these former colleagues, who incidentally, has just won a major scientific prize Jason may have won if he'd stayed the research course. On the way home, Jason is kidnapped at gunpoint, shepherded to an abandoned power plant on Chicago's south side, and made to take a mysterious drug. He wakes up in a lab, not remembering much. But he's safe, and all the people around him — obviously scientists of some sort — are hailing him as some sort of scientific hero.

What the heck just happened? Naturally, he doesn't understand, and his first instinct is to run away as fast as he can. But then he's shown the research he abandoned 15 years prior — only now, that research has been followed through to completion, resulting in a device that allows humans to travel to multiple universes, which he has apparently just done!

Of course, this has all kinds of terrifying and fascinating and morally complex consequences. But at that point, the main consequences for Jason are terror and sadness that he seems to be now in a different world from his beloved wife and son. From there, the plot unfolds quickly across multiple version of Chicago (indeed, multiple universes), as tries to find his way back to them

You could read this in one sitting if you wanted to. It's a great thriller to wrap up your summer or take on a plane. Highly enjoyed it.